A few months ago I was planning a vacation to Austria and Italy. I knew a few words and phrases in German and Italian, but that was about it. So I looked around for some portable language dictionaries. I thought Google Translate was great, but the web page didn't work that well on the iPhone. So I teamed up with David Singleton, a fellow engineer in our London office, to build an iPhone interface for Google Translate.

Google Translate for iPhone is optimized for speed, supports all of the existing Google Translate language pairs, and uses a client-side data-store on your iPhone to hang on to your past translations so you always have them at hand, even if you can't use the local data network. We wrote this using the AJAX Language API, so every time the Google Translate team updates the languages they support, the languages will automatically be added here.

I tried an early version of this interface out on my trip and it was great -- although my pronunciation wasn't. So every now and then, I would just hold up my phone to let people read what I couldn't. If you're wondering about data costs, I found that I could get between 200 and 400 translations in 1MB of data download. Although we don't charge for this service, your carrier may charge for the data usage so be sure to know what your roaming rates are. For my plan, I found that I could translate 400 phrases for less than $10 when roaming internationally.

To try Google Translate for iPhone, point your iPhone or iPod Touch web browser to www.google.com and choose the "more" tab. Or you can go directly to translate.google.com in your browser. If you are traveling this summer (perhaps on your way to Beijing?) we hope you find this useful.

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the mobile version of translation webpage has its advantages, however, it almost disables the website translation functionality for more powerful mobile devices such as iphone or ipod touch. Since on these devices the regular translation webpage is not available (the mobile version loads instead), could you add the option for entering or at least automatically recognizing an URL?

I second Ondrej's request; one of my pet hates is when a site detects I'm using a phone and "intelligently" downgrades me to a cut-down version of itself. National Rail does this (or certainly did last time I tried), the infuriating irony being that their full version works fine on the iPhone, but the PDA version they started redirecting me to did not. On top of the inconvenience, my inner geek objects to the idea of someone putting in additional effort in order to reduce the functionality available!

It always seemed odd to me, though, that you have to specify the input language: if you can understand, say, French well enough to translate it, surely you can usually distinguish it from German or Italian without being told which it is? (Obviously there are some corner cases, like "chips" which could be English or French, but in the general case you should be able to do it automatically.)

Even cooler would be if you could take a photo of some text, say a sign, and it used OCR to put the text into the translator automatically. It saves the time of inputting it manually. The OCR improvement would be even more useful in a place, say China or Japan, that doesn't have a written language based upon the Latin character set!

sometimes the translations, to spanish for instance, do not work perfectly. consuelo gives me back Consuelo (I guess it is thinking the name and not the noun for consolation or comfort). so i'd like it if it could output multiple meanings, more like other dictionaries will. That said, the full google translate site does the same, so not your iPhone app's issue. Plus it's FREE and gets a large number of single word translations right on, so i'm not mad about it and the interface is simple and clean! thanks for the good work and hopefully this gets expanded!

Nice work. My only criticism would be that it doesn't work offline so you need to make sure you have connectivity before you launch it (assuming you closed the browser window). Not so easy on an iPod touch.

Short of making a proper app, you could try using the "data:/" URI hack which still lets you store data in the database.

another one asking for a nifty icon for this nice add on that aligns smoothly with the icons for other google stuff like gmail, calendar, blogger, news and and and ... sure would add to the quick navigation on the iphone or ipod touch

It's not Googles fault that Apple doesn't let iPhone/Touch users change screen icons. Just zoom around on a part of the page then take the screenshot, thats all it is for the icons, and use that. Granted it's not a overused Web 2.0 looking clone icon but it's better than a fully zoomed out page 54x54 pixel screen.

I think the translation to hindi requires some work - try phrases like "how much for these apples" or "how far is the airport" - you can make out what the translation is trying to say but the hindi words are a little a messed up - but other than that - this is an awesome app - thanks for making it avail on the iPhone.

Can I use this for google pages and google reader, too? Somehow google presents me Spanish content when in Spain, even when I log in with my account that is cleary set to English. *sighs* No idea how to fix that or who to contact.

It's great to have Google translate on iPhone; however, AT&T data connectivity rates in Europe and Asia are exorbitant. Would any really use this tool when (s)he has to pay US$ 1 for translating a single sentence???

Hi - I'm using Google Translate on my HTC TyTN II running Windows Mobile 6.1 - the screen layout is not really optimised for this mobile device - is there a version that works better on this device? Or could it be created?

If iPhone is allegedly "the most advanced web browser ever on a portable device" (Apple's words), why can't it support HTML standards? Why instead is everyone expected to dumb down their code for the iPhone?

There should be a way to change the interface language. The site kind of outsmarts itself by setting the interface language based on GEOip. Assuming you're traveling in a foreign country, and don't speak the language, you're stuck using an interface you can't understand.

Japanese:It is great that it shows the native script, but can u put in the furigana as I can read the hiragana but not the kanji, it would be helpful...even more so for most, transliteration into Romanji. Thanks!

I used this app a lot last summer in Russia (unlocked iPhone with local SIM) and loved it. Now that I need it again I see there have been changes:1. translate.google.com no longer brings up the iPhone version (no problem).2. Going there via "more" leaves a second bar at the top taking up precious screen space (unfortunate).3. my biggest feature wish has still not been implemented (am I the only one?): selective deletion of word pairs. 4. Even better if one could export the word lists or save them permanently.